How to Start a Carwash: Avoid ‘mummified’ marketing

Three ways to avoid getting too wrapped up in your marketing approach.

In the article, “3 Cures for ‘Mummified Marketing,’” featured on Inc.’s website, contributor Lisa Calhoun discusses how startups can take their marketing strategies “from ‘walking dead’ to sprinting ahead.”

“You’re trying to inject life into your company every day. So have you noticed that when your marketing is muffled, the whole company acts mummified? It’s easy for marketing to get caught up in its own wrappings and trappings,” writes Calhoun in the article.

Calhoun shares three ways to help startups avoid getting too wrapped up in their marketing approach:

Wrap your message around customers. In many cases, a marketing team is not living the same life as the target audience. Don’t assume people generally relate to or enjoy the same type of things you do. “When you are not your target market, projecting too much of yourself instead of [your audience] just deadens your message,” says Calhoun in the article. She offers a two-fold fix. First, spend time with the target customers within their daily environment; walk a mile in their shoes; immerse yourself in your target audience’s world. Secondly, utilities case studies. Calhoun asserts in the article, “The beauty of the case study is that if you do it well, you can’t help but showcase your customer’s perspectives, ways of speaking and points of view.”

Don’t get twisted up with budgeting. Don’t use shortcuts for the sake of budgeting in place of “brains and brawn.” “For example, configuring 100 keywords for Google advertising in order to send more traffic to a site that has qualified organic traffic but poor conversion,” explains Calhoun in the article. Utilize adwords in a disciplined fashion, and make sure your website converts. “Sending more traffic to a stale site that won’t convert [is] a classic waste of cash,” reports Calhoun in the article. “It’s the ultimate marketing mummification move.” To create conversion takes time and brains, helping to establish the long-term wins needed to sustain a new business.

Avoid decision decay. Make smart and precise decisions when it comes to your marketing and sales efforts. Calhoun shares in the article that many startups may stumble on the question, “Is it marketing or is it sales that is responsible for cross-selling existing patrons and landing new customers?” This is “decision decay.” Create clear accountability for both marketing and sales. For example, have someone or a team responsible for the marketing efforts, which can help to generate cost-product leads from existing patrons; and then have an employee or team help with the sales efforts by finding ways to close on the leads collected from the marketing strategy.